Drew Nikonowicz

Alexander von Humboldt ... observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise.

We know amazingly little about what happens beneath our feet. It is fairly remarkable to think that Ford has been building cars and baseball has been playing World Series for longer than we have known that the Earth has a core.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.

Into the eighteenth century scholars could feel oddly comfortable in both camps [chemistry & alchemy] - like the German Johann Becher, who produced an unexceptionable wok on mineralogy called Physica Subterranea, but who also was certain that, given the right materials, he could make himself invisible.

Incidentally disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.

It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

Fact itself has become 'nonfiction.'

We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so 'realistic' that they can live in them.